Istio Joins CNCF: Exploring the New Ambient Mesh and Its Impact

In April this year Google proposed donating Istio to the CNCF, gaining broad community attention and support. After nearly six months of due diligence, on September 28 the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept Istio as an incubating project.

Istio’s service mesh logically consists of a data plane and a control plane. The data plane is made up of a set of intelligent Envoy proxies, most commonly deployed as sidecars, which mediate and control all network communication between microservices. The control plane manages and configures these proxies to route traffic.

Recently, Istio announced a brand‑new sidecar‑less data‑plane mode called Ambient Mesh, which moves data‑plane functionality from the sidecar container to the underlying network infrastructure to address common operational challenges. Ambient Mesh is currently released as an experimental feature and is under active community development, while Istio will continue to support the sidecar deployment model; both modes interoperate seamlessly.

Istio originated in 2016, jointly developed by Google, IBM, and Lyft’s team that built the Envoy proxy. Version 1.0 was released in June 2018, and by 2019 Istio became the fourth fastest‑growing open‑source project on GitHub. Today more than 190 companies have committed to using Istio, and over 20 vendors offer managed Istio products or plugins for Kubernetes platforms.

CNCF highlighted Istio’s current achievements:

85 maintainers from 15 companies

8,800 individual contributors

40,000 pull requests

20,000 issues

Over 260 releases

33,000 GitHub stars

8,500 Slack members

Key contributions to the Istio community come from:

Technology and cloud vendors such as Red Hat, Cisco, VMware, Intel, Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, and DaoCloud

Companies formed to commercialize Istio, including Tetrate, Aspen Mesh, and Solo.io

End‑users like Auto Trader UK, Salesforce, SAP, and Yahoo!

“We are thrilled to bring Google’s industry‑defining cloud‑native stack—Kubernetes, Istio, and Knative—under the CNCF umbrella,” said Craig Box, Google Cloud developer relations lead and Istio steering committee member. “Our team has been working to unite the service‑mesh community around the Kubernetes Gateway API, and we look forward to fostering more collaboration between CNCF projects. This is a major milestone for Istio and its community.”

Bruno Zhang, CTO of Huawei Cloud, added, “Istio is a key open‑source project in the cloud‑native ecosystem. Huawei Cloud has been contributing to Istio since 2018. Through use cases in the internet, finance, automotive, and other industries, Istio demonstrates its potential for enterprise digital transformation and application modernization. We are delighted to see Istio accepted by the CNCF and will continue to contribute and collaborate with the CNCF to promote broader adoption.”